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The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) is a major charitable organization in New York City and is the pre-eminent institution established in 1913 by the six-generation Rockefeller family. It was founded by John D. Rockefeller ("Senior"), along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr. ("Junior").
Its central mission is to "promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world."
The current president of the foundation is Judith Rodin Ph.D., former president of the University of Pennsylvania. The first woman to have headed an Ivy League institution, she is a current director of Citigroup and an honorary trustee of the Brookings Institution.
Over the years the Rockefeller family has distanced itself from direct involvement as trustees in the management of the foundation, to maintain the foundation's independence and avoid charges of undue family influence. The last family members actively involved were the former president John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his son John D. Rockefeller, IV. Nevertheless, the foundation has traditionally held a major portion of its shares portfolio in family oil companies, beginning with Standard Oil and now with its corporate descendants, including Exxon Mobil.
Through the years the foundation has expanded in scope and given financial assistance to and supported US foreign policy, industrial relations, government and public administration, higher education, scientific advancement, agriculture and increasing food production, social research, eugenics, the arts, and many other primary policy fields all over the world.
Its agricultural development program in Mexico, in close collaboration with the Ford Foundation, led to what has been called the Green Revolution, costing around $600 million, which brought new farming technology and increased productivity to Latin America and Asia in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. In the 1990s the foundation shifted its agriculture work and emphasis to Africa and in 2006 it joined with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a $150 million effort to fight hunger in the continent through improved agricultural productivity.
It has also provided significant funding for the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Thousands of scientists and scholars from all over the world have received foundation fellowships and scholarships for advanced study.
In 1978 the foundation invited Geoffrey Bell to set up the Group of Thirty, a high-powered and influential advisory group on global financial issues, whose current chairman is a longtime Rockefeller associate Paul Volcker (see External Links below). It has also been noteworthy for its longstanding financial support of the highly influential New York foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, established in 1921.
In addition, it has provided significant support for such organizations as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Brookings Institution, and the Russian Institute at Columbia University. In the arts it has helped establish or support the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario, Canada, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio; and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.
The foundation also owns and administers the Bellagio Study and Conference Center on a 50-acre estate, known as the Villa Serbelloni, in northern Italy. This was a gift received by the then-foundation president Dean Rusk in 1959 (who was later to become Kennedy's secretary of state). It is a residential complex offering scholars, artists, writers, musicians, scientists, policymakers, and development professionals from around the world an opportunity to pursue ideas and engage others in their work.
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Early years
Rockefeller had the initial idea to set up a major charitable foundation in 1901, but it was not until 1906 that Senior's famous business and philanthropic advisor, Frederick T. Gates, seriously revived the idea. It would not be the first foundation in America, but it brought to the whole concept of giving unprecedented scale and scope.
They applied for a federal charter for a tax-exempt foundation in the US Senate in 1910, but coupled with the ongoing antitrust suit against Standard Oil at the time, along with deep suspicion in some quarters of undue Rockefeller influence on the spending of the endowment, the result was the family withdrew the bill from Congress in order to seek a state charter.
On May 14, 1913, New York Governor William Sulzer approved a state charter for the foundation - two years after the Carnegie Corporation - with Junior becoming the first president; and endowed with an unprecedented $100 million in its first year, the giving of which insulated a large part of Senior's fortune from inheritance taxes. At the outset, the foundation was uniquely global in its approach, concentrating for its first decade entirely on the sciences, public health and medical education.
It was initially attached to the family office at Standard Oil's heaquarters at 26 Broadway, later (in 1933) initially shifting to the GE Building (then RCA), along with the family office, Room 5600, at Rockefeller Center; it was subsequently located in a separate location.
In 1913 the foundation set up the International Health Commission, which expanded the work of the Sanitary Commission worldwide, working against various diseases in fifty-two countries on six continents and twenty-nine islands, bringing international recognition of the need for public health and environmental sanitation. Its early field research on hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever provided the basic techniques to control these diseases and established the pattern of modern public health services.
The Commission established and endowed the world's first school of Hygiene and Public Health, at Johns Hopkins University, and later at Harvard, and then spent more than $25 million in developing other public health schools in the US and in 21 foreign countries - helping to establish America as the world leader in medicine and scientific research.
In 1915 the foundation set up the China Medical Board that established the first public health university in that country, the Peking Union Medical College, which opened in 1921; this was subsequently nationalised when the Communists took over the country in 1949.
Through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, established by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1918 and named after his mother, the family shifted the focus of philanthropy into becoming a major force in the social sciences, stimulating the founding of university research centres and creating the Social Science Research Council. To enhance consolidation, this memorial fund was folded into the foundation in 1929.
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Legacy
The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America after the Carnegie Corporation, the foundation's impact on philanthropy in general has been profound. The early institutions it set up have served as models for current organizations: the UN's World Health Organization, set up in 1948, is modeled on the International Health Division; the U.S. Government's National Science Foundation (1950) on its approach in support of research, scholarships and institutional development; and the National Institute of Health (1950) imitated its longstanding medical programs.
The endowment's assets were $3.4 billion at year-end 2005; although it is no longer the wealthiest foundation in America, it has the greatest pedigree.
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Further reading
Berman, Edward H. The Ideology of Philanthropy: The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations on American foreign policy, New York: State University of New York Press, 1983.
Brown, E. Richard, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Chernow, Ron, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., London: Warner Books, 1998.
Dowie, Mark, American Foundations: An Investigative History, Boston: The MIT Press, 2001.
Fosdick, Raymond B., John D. Rockefeller, Jr., A Portrait, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956.
Fosdick, Raymond B., The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, New York: Transaction Publishers, Reprint, 1989.
Harr, John Ensor, and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988.
Harr, John Ensor, and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Conscience: An American Family in Public and in Private, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991.
Jonas, Gerald. The Circuit Riders: Rockefeller Money and the Rise of Modern Science. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989.
Kay, Lily, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Nielsen, Waldemar, The Big Foundations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
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See also
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